The Good Thief's Guide to Paris (21 page)

TWENTY-SIX

I dialled the number on Nathan Farmer’s business card. A woman with a distinct French accent answered in studied English. I took a risk and gave her the number for Victoria’s mobile, then broke the connection.

“I might have to get you a new number when all this is over,” I told Victoria, with a shrug.

“Marvellous. Will you also notify my clients?”

“Isn’t that what your assistant is for?”

Victoria grunted and shook her head. She reached for the mobile, as if to place a call of her own, but before she had a chance it began to chirp and I answered it.

“Mr Howard?” said a cultured voice on the other end of the line.

“Ah, Mr Farmer. That was prompt.”

“Do you have the painting?”

I glanced down at the scene of Montmartre and nudged the gaudy frame with my toe. “I’m working on it.”

“I do hope things are progressing.”

“Oh, I think that’s fair to say.” I closed my eyes, concentrating on where I needed to take the conversation. “The only thing is, I’m afraid my task has become somewhat more challenging just recently.”

“Oh?”

“My picture was broadcast on the television news a few hours ago. The saddest part is it even looks like me.”

“I’ll address it.”

I frowned. “Excuse me?”

“It won’t happen again.”

I raised my hand to the back of my head. “You can really do that?”

“For the next day or so, it should be possible. After that, it will be out of my control.”

I whistled. I was beginning to wish Nathan Farmer worked for me. “Some control. These clients of yours must be influential people.”

“I very much doubt you have the time to speculate on such things. Was there anything else?”

“Plenty. I need to speak with Pierre.”

Farmer became silent. I opened my eyes and gave Victoria a doubtful look. She held up her hands, fingers crossed.

“I’m quite sure that’s impossible.”

“Oh come now. A man who can change the television news? Surely you can work a telephone?”

“It’s a far more complicated matter than you realise.”

“Isn’t everything these days?”

Farmer became silent again. I could imagine him turning my request over in his mind. I was afraid to let him think about it for too long – he’d only convince himself it couldn’t be done.

“It’s very important I speak to Pierre,” I went on. “I want you to have the painting but I need to talk to him to make that happen.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “But there will be conditions.”

“You mean you’ll listen in.”

“Indeed.”

“Fair enough,” I told him. “Start dialling.”

“Charlie?” Pierre said hesitantly, as though expecting a trick.

“Yes, it’s me,” I said. “How have you been?”

“Not so good, my friend. The food here, it is terrible, oui?”

I smiled. “And the company?”

“They ask many questions.”

“About me?”

“Oui.” He made a whining noise in his throat. “And my work. I tell them, I am retired.”

“And they don’t believe you?”

“I do not know. They ask only questions.”

“They’re listening to this call, you understand.”

“Ah, in this case I will not say where the bodies are buried, yes?”

He chuckled but I didn’t respond. So far as I could tell, he didn’t know about Catherine just yet. I figured it was better to leave things that way. If I mentioned her death, it might panic him into saying something that could create problems for both of us. I shut my eyes for a moment and did my best to concentrate.

“Listen Pierre,” I said. “I can get you out of this but we need to be straight with one another. They want me to give them the painting.”

Pierre paused, thinking through the implications of what I was saying. “Do you have it?” he asked, in a hushed tone, as if somehow only I would be able to hear.

“No. But I think I can find it, so long as I can work out who your client was.”

“But I do not know this,” he whispered.

“Truthfully?”

“Oui. I already told you.”

I exhaled and covered my face with my hand. “You said they sent the money to your post office box, correct?”

Pierre didn’t confirm what I’d said but I guessed that was only because he knew the call was being monitored.

“I was thinking, maybe we can use that information to smoke them out.”

“I do not see how. It will not work.”

“Okay,” I went on, trying to sound a good deal more patient than I felt. “What else? They contacted you by phone, right?”

“Oui.”

“They didn’t leave a number?”

“No.” He paused for a moment. “Mais . . .”

“What?”

“My telephone, it has a screen, yes?” he said, his voice suddenly brightening. “On the screen, you may see the number that is calling. The last twenty numbers, in fact.”

“You’re saying it might still be on there?”

“It is possible, yes.”

“Wonderful,” I responded. “Give me your address.”

There was another pause. I suppose Pierre knew precisely what I had in mind and it wasn’t altogether surprising he was reluctant about it. I don’t know, maybe he’d left his place in a state before the police had picked him up and he didn’t want me to think badly of him.

“I’m not going to rip you off, Pierre. I’m trying to help you here.”

“And help yourself too, yes?”

“Goes with the territory. But like you said, we’re friends, right? You can trust me.”

I glanced across at Victoria. She looked pensive. I gave her a wink.

“Rue Soufflot,” Pierre said finally, in a gruff tone. “In the fifth arrondissement. Apartment 7, building 18. There is an electronic lock on the front doors to the building. The code is . . .”

“No worries,” I interrupted him, conscious that Farmer was listening. “I’ll figure it out. How many digits?”

“Five.”

“And your apartment? What kind of locks do you have?”

“
Fortins
. Two of them.”

“
Fortins
? That’s all?”

“I only live there, Charlie.”

I blew air through my lips. “Even so, when this is over, you should really install something more secure.”

“When this is over,” Pierre repeated. “And when do you think this may be?”

“Less than a day, I hope,” I told him, putting my hand to my stomach. “But there’s a lot to do and I’m going to have to press on.”

“Then good luck, oui?”

“I’m going to need it.” I cleared my throat. “Mr Farmer? Would you be so good as to call me back?”

I cut the connection and held Victoria’s mobile in my palm for a few moments before it began to chirp once again. I put the telephone to my ear and told Nathan Farmer when and where I intended to return the painting to him. Once our conversation was over, I hung up and peered across at Victoria.

“You get most of that?”

“I caught the gist.”

“Think it’ll work?”

“Who knows?” she said. “I guess stranger things have happened.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

I guessed so too. Take me, for example, preparing to break into an apartment that belonged to my fence. Until a few hours ago, I hadn’t even known where Pierre lived. Now, I was stood opposite the double doors to the outer courtyard of his building, admiring the neighbourhood he had made his home. It was a fine location, no more than a minute away from the Jardin du Luxembourg in one direction and the Sorbonne in the other. It was the type of address where any successful Parisian would aspire to live and I must confess I was a little surprised that Pierre could afford it.

The doors that guarded the front entrance to Pierre’s building were entirely suited to the area. Painted a lustrous royal blue, they were many inches thick and many feet taller than me. There was no keyhole to pick, because as Pierre had told me, the doors were secured by an electronic locking mechanism that was accessed via a digital control panel. I waited until the street was relatively quiet around me before stepping between the lines of parked and dented city cars and approaching the panel. I had my fingerprint powder with me as a way of discovering the code, but I feared the street was too exposed to employ that particular approach. And in any case, I didn’t think it would be necessary. Five of the keys were recessed a little further than the remainder – as though they’d lost their spring from being compressed too many times. Sure, it would take me a while to enter variations of the numbers until I hit upon the right combination but it was still feasible. Then again, perhaps I would try something else.

If I was Faulks, I thought ruefully, I’d have some kind of handy electronic gadget in my pocket that I could simply insert into the digital panel. The device would flash and whirr and run through a series of random digits and only a few seconds later I’d hear the thud of the locking mechanism retracting, simple as that. I didn’t have any such gadget, though, and truth be told I doubt it exists. And since I didn’t have a ladder or a grappling hook or a utility belt on me, I wasn’t about to scale the gates or the limestone walls. There wasn’t even a drainpipe to shinny up.

With all those options ruled out, I went for the next best thing – I waited. And perhaps five minutes later, the nearside door opened magically of its own accord and I watched one of Pierre’s neighbours step out. My accomplice was a young man wheeling a racing bike, wearing day-glo Lycra and a safety helmet, and he was only too grateful when I reached for the door and held it open so that he could manhandle his bike through the gap. Once he was outside, I passed through the doorway before it might occur to him to query whether I had any right to be there. Not that it seemed probable he would. At a rough guess, I thought the building was likely to contain something in the region of forty apartments, so there was no reason to assume that anyone living there would be able to recognise all of their neighbours. For that matter, the cyclist could have been a thief himself, though I’m not altogether sure he would have been able to stash much swag beneath the clinging fabric of his cycling shorts.

After swinging the large door closed behind me, I found myself inside a shaded, cobblestoned courtyard. I stood for a moment in the pleasing coolness, listening to the silence all around me and experiencing the sensation of having entered a well-ordered oasis in the middle of bustling St. Germain. There were a collection of terracotta pots off to my side, filled with climbing plants, and beyond them a wall-mounted fountain dribbled water into a wooden cask.

Directly ahead of me was an archway and beneath the archway were two opposing doorways. A series of numbers above the doorway on my right told me it was the route I needed to follow to reach Pierre’s apartment, so I pushed through the painted wooden door and began to climb the stone internal staircase. I could hear my footsteps echo around me but that was all. The world beyond the courtyard walls was entirely muted.

I had a pair of disposable plastic gloves with me but I didn’t slip them on. I might not have had a key but Pierre had pretty much consented to me cracking his locks and Farmer knew all about it, so I wasn’t concerned about fingerprints. And the truth was I was glad to leave my gloves in my pocket. In order to put them on, I would need to remove the dressing from my fingers, and since the knuckle Francesca had attacked had swollen quite visibly, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to slide my gloves over it in any case.

Of course, keeping my fingers bound meant I had less dexterity and less feeling in my hands, and if the locks I was about to tackle had been of a better standard, that loss of sensation would have been a problem. As it was, when I finally confronted the
Fortins
locks Pierre had warned me about they looked every bit as pliable as I’d imagined. I whistled and shook my head. Roughly translated, ‘Fortins’ means ‘small fort’, but in my experience they’re about as tough to overcome as an addiction to chewing razor blades. It was incredible to me that Pierre could be so cavalier about his property. There was no way he could have believed the digital code on the courtyard doors offered him sufficient protection from a break-in and, to be honest, I was glad it was something I’d only just found out. If I’d known the kind of locks he had on his place before now, I’m pretty sure it would have put doubts in my mind about how much I could trust his professionalism. After all, if he was this careless about his own security, then how could I be confident he was capable of protecting me?

Mind you, complaining about such things seemed a little prudish considering how much easier the
Fortins
were about to make my day. I ran my fingertip over them, as though they might contain some kind of hidden message, but the only message they gave out was that picking them would be relatively easy. I knew from experience that there were only four pins on each lock and that the cam and the retracting mechanism were made of low-grade metals that could be forced if necessary. A beginner with a flick-knife could probably defeat them. And thinking about beginners made me think about Bruno and that, in turn, made me think about using one of my rakes. Being an impulsive type, I decided to go with my instincts, so I reached for my spectacles case and removed one of my rakes and a screwdriver, and in about the same time as it had taken me to do exactly that, I had both locks cracked and ready to turn.

I prodded the door open with my foot, stepped inside and was still putting my tools back inside my spectacles case when I suddenly realised I hadn’t knocked. My assumption had always been that Pierre lived alone but as I stood at the threshold to his apartment it occurred to me for the first time that I had nothing on which to base that assumption. I guess I’d formed the opinion because whenever I’d called his number, Pierre had always been the one to answer, and I couldn’t recall ever hearing any background voices. But what did that really mean? It could be that he had a separate business line that nobody else was allowed to pick up. Or it could just be that whenever I’d called in the past, his seven-foot, sixteen-stone Fijian bodyguard had happened to be out.

I stood still, door open, listening for any movement from the interior of the apartment. I couldn’t hear anything but now the idea of somebody being there had occurred to me I was finding it hard to shake the notion. I really wanted to shut the door to prevent any passing neighbours seeing me but at the same time the thought of taking a few noisy steps and easing the door closed was far from appealing. I was stuck, unable to act for perhaps two entire minutes before sense finally took hold of me and I closed the door, then called out to see if anybody was home. After all, if Pierre did live with someone, chances were they knew what he did for a living as well as the situation he currently found himself in. So it struck me as unlikely they’d object to me being there, especially once I’d explained that I was aiming to help.

As it turned out, nobody responded to my call, and once I’d passed through the compact hallway and into the main living area I felt pretty certain I was by myself. Mainly that was because the apartment was very small and I couldn’t imagine where anybody could be hiding. The living room was open-plan, with a glass desk positioned beneath two full-length windows, a sofa and an armchair in the middle of the parquet floor, and a wall of fitted shelving units set back beneath a mezzanine level towards the rear. A step-ladder led up to the mezzanine and I climbed the first few rungs and poked my head up for a look. There was a neatly made futon bed and a reading lamp and a
Paris Match
magazine and that was all. The ladder and the sleeping platform were a surprise to me because although Pierre was relatively fit he was getting on in years. Perhaps he’d chosen the apartment to defy the ageing process.

I poked my head through the other doors I could see in the studio. The first led into a small kitchen, the next opened onto an even smaller bathroom with a toilet, a sink and a corner shower, and the final door concealed a fitted wardrobe. I’d like to be able to describe the rest of the place but that’s all there was. You could swing a cat if you happened to have one to hand, but it wouldn’t thank you for it because it would bounce off just about every wall. I was beginning to understand why Pierre had seemed so relaxed when I’d spoken to him on the phone – it wouldn’t have surprised me if the cell he was being detained in was bigger than his apartment.

Thinking of phones made me remember why I’d come in the first place. I turned round, scanning the space I’d found myself in, until I spied a sleek black telephone positioned on a low side-table beside the glass desk. I crossed over to the telephone and crouched down and peered at the display. It told me the time and the date. Lower down, I saw a column of speed-dial buttons and below them, a further button with the image of an address book printed on it. Beside the button was a flashing light.

I pressed the button and the digital screen updated to show a telephone number beside a date and a time. I began to cycle through the stored numbers for the most recent calls the telephone had received and soon found I could discount several of them because they related to the period since Pierre had first contacted me about the job. Once or twice, I saw my home telephone number and also Victoria’s mobile number appear. Finally, I neared the end of the list and located five numbers that could have belonged to Pierre’s client. I grabbed a pad of paper and a pen from Pierre’s desk and wrote the numbers down. I read through them quickly, hoping to recognise one of them, but without any luck. Two of the calls were preceded by international dial codes – one from the UK and one from the States. The three that were left looked as if they were local.

I stood up from my crouched position and stretched my back, meanwhile scouting around the side-table for any signs of a telephone directory. There was a low console unit against the wall and I slid the doors back and rooted around inside. There were flyers for take-away food outlets, clusters of paper receipts, reams of correspondence, discarded pens, cassette tapes, a spare light bulb and even a sleeping-mask branded with the logo of a national airline. There was no telephone directory, though, and I was about to discount the idea altogether when it occurred to me to check the fitted shelving units beneath the mezzanine.

I crossed the room, bowing as I passed below the mezzanine even though it was a good foot clear of my head. The shelves contained all manner of items: DVD cases, CD cases, vinyl LPs, ornaments, framed photographs and books. Among the books I was pleased to see a collection of my Michael Faulks burglar novels, spines thoroughly cracked. I was even more pleased to see a Paris telephone directory. I removed the directory from the shelf, flicked it open to around the middle of the book and began shuffling back towards the glass desk and the pad of paper on which I’d scrawled the telephone numbers.

I was maybe halfway across the room before I heard the noise for the first time. It wasn’t footsteps or the sound of a key in the lock or even the creak and muffled tick of a gun trigger being cocked. It was the ungodly squelch of my stomach. I paused, frowned, and clutched my hand to my guts. I could feel my insides turning over. My intestines weren’t just cramping; they were clenching and unclenching as if a wrestler was trying to squeeze the very life from them. A bubble of gas escaped my backside and my stomach burped and gurgled like a blocked sink. I felt a muscle in my bottom quiver, dropped the telephone directory and clutched my hands to my buttocks. I raced towards the bathroom, knock-kneed, squeezing my cheeks together so hard they trembled. I reached for the handle on the bathroom door and was already visualising myself collapsing mercifully down onto the toilet seat when I realised I couldn’t. The laxatives had done their job, but I’d be a fool to risk loosing the luggage pendant down the U-bend of Pierre’s toilet.

Cursing, I turned from the door and lunged for the kitchen. I snatched open a kitchen cupboard, then a drawer, desperately trying to find some kind of receptacle. I spied a copper saucepan on the hob and I was all set to grab it and go right there and then in the middle of the kitchen before some inner resolve and sense of dignity took hold of me and I willed myself to hang on for just a moment longer. I opened another drawer and, God in heaven, praise be to Allah, I found a roll of clear plastic bags. I grabbed the roll and darted for the bathroom, meanwhile fiddling with the buckle on my belt, then ripping open the button-fly on my trousers, hauling my boxer shorts down and dropping onto the porcelain toilet seat. I tore a bag from the roll, blew on the opening, tugged the thing apart and stuffed it down between my legs. Then I let go, and believe me, it’s really best for all concerned if I refrain from describing the nature of what followed.

Suffice it to say that when it was all over with, I was more than a little bit grateful to be able to slip a disposable plastic glove onto my left hand in order to search for the pendant. I found it soon enough, which perhaps isn’t surprising considering what it was I was searching through, and once I had the pendant I washed it and soaped it and rinsed it in scalding hot water. Then I rewashed it and resoaped it and rerinsed it before gingerly risking a sniff. Much to my relief, I remained conscious. Finally, I felt suitably ashamed of what had happened to give Pierre’s toilet a thorough clean before slipping the pendant into my pocket and returning to the kitchen with the roll of plastic bags.